Seventh Sunday after Trinity
July 18, 1858
“The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Ghost, be with you all.”—2 Corinthians xiii. 14.
The passage: May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all.
We end our daily morning and evening prayer with these words. The compilers of our Service surely thought they expressed the deepest ground of prayer, its inmost meaning and most perfect result. I have chosen them today because I hope they resolve a difficulty about how prayer relates to the Lord’s Supper, one that troubles some very earnest minds who do not concern themselves with trifles. The question is: “Can we say that the presence of our Lord promised in the Eucharist is of a different kind from the presence a faithful Christian may expect in ordinary prayer?” Some who have no wish to disparage the Sacrament answer a firm no. They fear turning it into a charm, and think they would lower its dignity by claiming too much for it. Their proposition may seem to them almost beyond dispute. But it meets a strong opposition, deserving the highest respect, which asserts a truth that cannot safely be set aside. The subject may be less embarrassing if we ask, not what the honour of the Eucharist demands, but what prayer needs in order to be Christian and effectual.
I. When I speak of Christian prayer as different from other prayer, what do I mean? Are the cries that have gone up from sorrowing creatures all over the world to count for nothing? Are we to suppose the true Lord of Sabaoth has not heard them because they were addressed in ignorance to the many gods and lords who are really His servants and creatures? St. Paul speaks of the groaning of unconscious nature as prophetic of a divine birth. Can we then suppose that God ignores even the most confused utterance of one made in His own image? If by “Christian prayer” we mean something opposed to Hindu, Muslim, or savage prayer in this sense, I must hold that we set aside the express declarations of Scripture and the very glad tidings of the New Testament.
For the New Testament teaches me that I do not pray by any excellence of my own, and that I am not heard because I am better than others in belief or conduct. I pray by “the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ.” My nature struggles hard to win blessings for itself, and does not care where they come from. It supposes they are given by some visible object or by an unseen Power that thinks and acts as I do. I measure that Power by my own intellect, judge Him by my own heart, and divide Him up according to my own notions. His mind and mine clearly clash, or things would turn out as I want. So I must move Him, by hard entreaty or by bribes He will probably approve, to take my view and overlook our disagreement. This is the prayer of the selfish nature. It is the prayer of Jew, Turk, Hindu, and Christian alike, so far as he yields to that nature.
We have all yielded to it. At times it has left us torpid, taught us to see prayer as ridiculous and impossible, mocked every aspiration, and been a mere gravitation towards death. At times it has been full of restless wishes and fears. It would listen to the priest of any faith, adopt any suggestion for piercing the iron or brass of the heavens, and urge any sacrifice to escape a threatened calamity.
Should not this experience of prayer as the greatest of contradictions and the greatest of necessities teach us that a power is seeking to rouse us from the sleep of Nature and deliver us from its fever? It is a gentle, penetrating power, for which the dew is the fitting Scriptural emblem. It acts on our wills, continually stirring them to claim their place among their kindred spirits, the sons of God. All men have felt it. It has come in hours of shameful degradation, when they were sinking to the state of animals, reminding them of another destiny, speaking in a language other than their enchanter’s, and bidding them leave the sty where so many companions have been transformed. It has come in sorrow, consoling and bracing them to effort and hope. It has taught them to receive messages of sympathy from earth and sky that once looked on them with leaden indifference. It has given them glimpses of a world of order and peace they might live in. It has taught them to murmur “Our Father which art in Heaven” just when they felt most bound to earth and most tempted to think themselves only its children.
I say all men have known these impulses, and that trusting, humble, confessing prayer, not selfish prayer to win gifts and overcome divine reluctance, has been their fruit. Who has offered such prayers we cannot know and need not ask. But we ought to know, and it is our privilege to know, where the inspiration to pray comes from. The name we bear implies that it does not fall on us casually from some distant, benevolent genius. It is the calm, regular action on our spirits of the Son of Man and Son of God, in whose likeness we were made, who took our flesh, and who has redeemed us to share His filial life and throne. Once we have learned His name and confessed His authority, we cannot confine it by rules of ours. It becomes all but impossible to think His grace absent from any age or circumstance, for those who ascribe every good thing to that grace and cannot conceive how anyone could exist a moment if left to the wayward impulses of his own nature. They are sure they are entrusted with a Gospel to all nations about this grace, and that they are to teach the nations what their instinct of prayer means by telling them what Christ has done and is doing. But then they must ask: How are we to teach this? How are we to testify to the everlasting truth of His word, “Lo, I am with you”? How are we to assure ourselves that it has not come to nothing, as we keep fancying it has? The answer, it seems to me, is not Prayer simply but the Holy Communion. That festival clears the mists from the nature of prayer by bearing a witness to the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ that prayer alone cannot bear. It gives prayer its Christian meaning by declaring that the origin of every thought that rises from us to God lies in Him who descended from God to us. It presents His divine Sacrifice as the only interpretation of our relation to God and the only ground of our devotion, and sets Him forth as the living bond between all spirits and the Father of Spirits. I greatly fear that if we measure this Sacrament by our prayers, instead of referring our prayers to it as their measure, we leave our evil hearts a plea for putting their own efforts in the place of Christ’s grace, and we shall lose the faith of His presence in the one service as much as in the other.
II. We sometimes limit the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ to His Forgiveness. No wonder: our daily resistance to goodness and gentleness, our indifference to sympathy, and our refusal to follow where He leads may well make us gather all other blessings under this one.
In a fuller sense He Himself teaches us to connect grace with forgiveness: “If ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your heavenly Father forgive you your trespasses.” The words startle us. We think they make God’s mercy the consequence of our good deeds, not their source. But if the grace of Christ is the continual operation of a forgiving Mind upon ours, can we not see that an unforgiving habit is precisely what opposes that operation and with which that Mind cannot hold intercourse? We stand aloof from the divine forgiveness, we refuse it, and prefer to stay estranged. Are we not showing greater faith in Christ’s power to remove every obstacle when we ask Him to cast the unforgiving spirit out of us, than if we asked Him to bestow all possible gifts without that? Does not the apparent condition give us a brighter glimpse of the freedom and fullness of His mercy?
So we can go on to the next clause, “The Love of God,” and ask what it has to do with our prayers. The selfish nature asks for some definite thing with which it dreams it will be satisfied. He who gives His children the bread they need and not the stones they crave sends His grace to draw them into an infinite region and make them aspire after an infinite blessing. I ask where this forgiveness comes from, this human tenderness that contrasts so strangely with my coldness, this just and wise discipline that is not halted by my crying out. So far as it stirs me to pray, it stirs me to seek its origin. Prayer is the incessant demand: “Source of all life and goodness, where art Thou? It is Thyself I need, not Thy treasures. Take them away if Thou wilt not reveal Thyself while I have them, or if they hinder me from receiving that revelation.” So the more the Son’s grace works upon men and in them, the more it urges them to look for something beyond and deeper than itself: what is not ours, what we cannot take in, what has been and is and is to come. Yet the fullest discovery of the Love that embraces all things could never make the definite, personal grace less necessary or less dear. The Son will come out more distinctly, both as the Man of Sorrows and as the Word by whom all things were made, as we learn whose will He came to do and into whose glory He ascended. His Cross and Passion will be regarded more than ever as the Revelation of the Godhead, on which the human spirit must dwell if it is not to lose God, or see Him split again into idol forms distorted by its own terrors. The Universe will be welcomed as beautiful and harmonious because it reflects parts of the Image seen whole in the weakness of Gethsemane and the desertion of Calvary. And a man will turn from his own lonely experiences to those facts of history, because they declare not a partial love, to him and a few Christians, but Love itself, the very Nature of God.
St. Paul was writing to a Church. He wanted Christ’s grace to be with them all, the whole body and each member. But that body was a body of witnesses, each to witness in his own sphere and degree. To what? To a God who so loved the world as to give His only begotten Son for it. Unless they fulfilled this function, they could not overthrow the false gods of the heathens around them or protest effectually against Jewish incredulity and exclusiveness. The Church of Corinth was especially liable to forget it, and St. Paul had written two Epistles to say why. They gathered round special leaders, formed sects, and made Christ Himself the head of a sect. They glorified themselves on their spiritual privileges and gifts as men anointed with the Spirit. They acted carnally and sensually. They met for the common Christian Feast and turned it into a symbol of their lack of fellowship. The Apostle exposes all these symptoms of a deep-seated disease. But he does not try to cure it by telling the patient he has overrated his position. He tells the Corinthians that all things are theirs, Paul, Cephas, Apollos, life, death, because they are Christ’s, and Christ is God’s. Nothing is too good for them if they receive it as a universal good, not a particular or exclusive one. So, consistently, he concludes with not only “The Grace of our Lord Jesus Christ” but “the Love of God, be with you.” The highest inheritance of angels is for you sinful Corinthians: that Love which is above all, around all, beneath all. You may ascend into it as Christ has ascended. What argument against sectarianism and exclusiveness could strike such a blow as this magnificent invitation?
But if prayer needs the Love of God as its deepest foundation and ultimate end, something is surely needed to show that it has this foundation and can reach this end. Prayer is apt to take its colour from the mind of the one who offers it, and to stop far short of its goal. The petitioner forgets the common blessing in the special one, the essential glory in the accidental. What will recall him to the truth? The Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper carries the assurance that a Love higher than heaven and deeper than hell has worked, is working, and will not cease working to overcome the schismatic tendencies of human beings. It will not let them pursue separate objects or rest until they find the one object. On this ground too, does not the Eucharist rise above Prayer, since it speaks directly of God and what He is, and of men as all miserable alike without Him and all blessed alike in the enjoyment of Him?
III. St. Paul ends his benediction with “the Communion of the Holy Ghost.” Whenever an Apostle spoke of the Christ, he took pains to show that he meant “the Anointed of God,” “He that anoints men with the Holy Spirit.” From the day John came preaching in the wilderness, this had been declared the sign of the expected Deliverer and King, the power with which He would work and the gift by which He would raise men to the condition of those “born not of flesh or of blood, or of the will of man, but of God.” But was not all that could be said of this power already implied in “the Grace of Christ” and “the Love of God”? Implied, surely. It was implied in every announcement of the Old Dispensation, in every Psalmist’s song, and in the sympathy of every Ruler and Prophet with God’s purposes and with the misery of those who resisted Him. A Spirit was in the midst of the nation, speaking in its seers, showing them visions of sorrow and glory, and helping them struggle on in the darkest times, certain of an approaching light. But the Spirit had not yet been manifested, and these men were waiting for Him. Till the Desire of Nations was manifested in the flesh, this desire could not be fulfilled. When it was, and the day of Pentecost declared a communion for all nations because a Spirit bound all nations into the Name of the Father and the Son, those names could be uttered as never before. It was possible to speak of the Grace of One who entered into all human weakness without lessening the awe of the Godhead. The Holiest of the Holiest was opened, and a mystery of Love revealed that no loveless creature could look into. This grace and love, then, were not absorbed by the Communion of the Holy Ghost, though they involve it; through that Communion human beings can apprehend them as eternally distinct and eternally one. If that Communion were lost, grace and love would again be hidden, the message to the nations set at naught, and the world would shrivel into its old narrowness and split into its old divisions.
The conditions in the Corinthian Church that I mentioned pointed to strife within the Christian community. It was the same strife that had torn nations and families apart from the beginning, but it went nearer the heart of humanity, more inward and deadly. In particular, their quarrel over the gifts of the Spirit, and how far each teacher or faction could claim them, was a gloomy prophecy, at the start of the new age, of the triumphs the Evil Spirit would win in each period of it. But was it not possible to dig a yard below his mines? Could there be no counter-prophecy of his final defeat? That deeper mine lies in the words “Communion of the Holy Ghost.” The gifts of the Spirit were turned into occasions of contention and self-glorification: who could speak with most tongues, who work most wonders? Even the graces of the Spirit, of which humility and meekness are the most conspicuous, could be pleaded as reasons for despising others, as motives for saintly pride. St. Paul’s divine words, “They that have not the Spirit of Christ are none of His,” might in later days be turned into an argument for drawing deep lines round those who could say, “We have the Spirit of Him who made Himself of no reputation and was the friend of publicans and sinners; stand by, you have it not.” But if the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of Communion, and that is what distinguishes Him from the Spirit of unholiness, hatred, and lies, these subtleties of that Spirit are detected and laid bare. It is shown to what end his divine Adversary has worked from the first, how every effort to divide has brought out more fully the Spirit’s fusing energy, how men have been held together in spite of themselves, how life and unity presume and demand each other, how surely a living Unity will at last supersede all dead uniformity, and how it will confound every attempt to restore vitality to the limbs by tearing the body apart.
The Holy Communion testifies by its very title that Christ came for this end, and that for this end He was baptized with the Spirit. No prayers cut off from this Sacrament can represent the blessing of communion and the curse of division as it does. Carry the meaning of the Eucharist into public worship, make it the centre, and worship becomes real: it points to self-abnegation and the united service of the Eternal Father. Carry it into private worship, and that becomes an act of communion with a present Lord. But try this communion by the standard of our public or private worship, and it is in danger of sinking, as they so easily do, into mere utterance of our own wishes or mere repetition of traditional words.
A common way of meeting questions like these is to say they are merely questions of words. I find that irritating and unsatisfactory. Even if the assertion were well founded, precious realities may lie under questions of words, and it is more helpful to try to bring them out than to assume they are absent. But it is not a question of words whether Christ is really present with us at all times, and whether the Lord’s Supper is a true Sacrament because He appointed it to remind us of His Presence. Those who hold that conviction are bound to proclaim it, and so to vindicate every mode of intercourse with Christ: the awfulness of prayer, the daily charities of life, and the Sacrament. I think they fail to defend that noble position if they refuse to admit the principle their opponents are struggling for, that this Sacrament transcends the other modes of intercourse. Put it on the same level with them, forget that it is the specially Christian ordinance, and they must become weak and may become false. No, the strife is not verbal. The better each party understands the substance for which it contends, the more justice it will do to the substance for which the other contends. So the Unity of the Church, which we sometimes despair of, may come out of the contentions now rending it. So we may receive these words as addressed to us, the feeble fighters of these latter days, by St. Paul and the triumphant society of which he is a member: “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the Communion of the Holy Ghost, be with you all, Amen.”